The building blocks of legitimacy

David Edelstein at Foreign Policy grapples with the concept of “international legitimacy” from a realist perspective. Edelstein says that a state views an action as legitimate if it expects to materially benefit, with the occupations of Japan & Iraq provided as contrasting bits of evidence. He gives some slight criticism to Steve Walt, who I think avoids the claimed realist mistake in his post on “cheap talk” (not the game–theorist blog). I think actors whose dominance seems unshakable are accorded more legitimacy and framing something in terms of a completely defeated historical enemy of that actor imparts illegitimacy. The obvious case is World War 2 (“it’s always Munich again!”), which resulted in the U.S becoming the most powerful international actor and eventual “lone superpower” and “world’s policeman” with the end of the Cold War. But the point of all this was just to invite readers to give their thoughts on how perceptions of legitimacy arise. And to what extent does legitimacy affect behavior rather than lip-service/posturing? Does merely possessing the latter not constitute legitimacy at all?

Melendwyr/Caledonian has somewhat related thoughts on power resting on voluntary obedience here.

Same thing as sovereignty – it’s legitimate in so far as it’s impossible to oppose it. If some alien race came to earth and imposed some new order and any act of disobedience was perfectly impossible, their legitimacy would be indistinguishable from divinity.

There is lesser, devolved legitimacy in some kind of legalistic argument that accedes to a framework imposed by a difficult-to-oppose force. But it’s all from the barrel of a gun or a hegemonic belief in the end.

“The Authenticity Hoax” is a book by Andrew Potter which argues that “authentic” lifestyles/activities are a form of exclusive status seeking. The problem of inauthenticity only arises with modernity, hunter-gatherers & peasants don’t have much option to be anything else (my interpolation: this is also believed to be the cause of the smaller gender differences in personality in traditional cultures). So one may conclude that the authenticity-seekers are in a way even more artificial, but to my mind that seems like just the sort of more-authentic-than-thou posturing the author is mocking. He’s got a site/blog for the book hosted on squarespace and did a diavlog with Will Wilkinson about the book.

Potter co-authored “The Rebel Sell” with Joseph Heath (whose newest book is “Filthy Lucre” and whose previous is “The Efficient Society” about Canada). Their thesis is that marketers do not push conformity (David Brin made a similar point about the similarly maligned Hollywood) but individuality and competition for distinction. The deeper political message is that the think-global-act-local “lifestyle radicalism” which rose to popularity in the 90s cannot accomplish anything because most social problems are collective action problems rather than being amenable to an upsurge in counter-culture. Old fashioned leftism (whose Marxist professor exemplars are as boring & unfashionable as it gets) using the blunt force of the State can actually get things done.